Applications, such as conferencing services that use multimedia streaming rely on broadcast/multicast data frames for data transmission. Data frames sent from one network entity but received by all entities within a particular bridged or domain network are referred to as broadcast data frames. Data frames sent from one entity and received by many (but not all) entities within a network domain are referred to as multicast data frames. These applications are generally bandwidth intensive and may place a significantly heavy load on the network, typically virtual local area network (VLAN) that they belong to. A VLAN is a group of networked devices that are in a separate broadcast domain even though they share a physical medium with other networked devices which do not belong to the VLAN. For example, a VLAN may comprise a number of local area network (LAN) segments which are on different ports of an Ethernet switch. The issue can get compounded if the VLAN happens to be distributed across multiple locations, such as an enterprise network including multiple offices in different locations that are interconnected using Metro Ethernet services, such as a provider bridging shown in FIG. 1.
One of the reasons for the heavy load being placed on the VLAN is due to forwarding of data frames based on a unique identifier, such as a service identifier (SID) by service provider networks. The SID is generally assigned by the service provider to the enterprise, without giving any consideration to the originating entity VLAN information within the enterprise.
For example, consider a common enterprise deployment scenario shown in FIG. 1, where the enterprise 100 has multiple locations (i.e., head office, branch office 1 and branch office 2), interconnected using a transport layer 2 connectivity solution, such as a provider backbone network 110, also referred to as a provider bridging. Each division within a branch office is associated with a unique customer virtual local area network identifier (C-VID), i.e., the same division across various branch offices has the same C-VID. Broadcast/multicast data frames sourced within a division, (e.g., a sales division in branch office 1) intended for sales divisions at other locations within the enterprise 100, traverse the provider backbone network 110 to get to intended destination(s). During run-time, upon receiving the data frames from one of the multiple locations at a port of one of Ethernet switches S1, S2, and S3, a pre-determined SID is associated with the data frames by the provider backbone network 110. The SID (and not the C-VID) is used within the provider backbone network 110 to forward the data frames to other locations. As a consequence, data frames destined from the sales division at the head office is forwarded by the provider backbone network 110 by making copies of each received data frame to both the branch offices 1 and 2, even though it is destined only to branch office 1. This can result in unnecessary traffic, going towards branch office 2 and hence can consume valuable network bandwidth of the service provider as well as result in unnecessary network utilization by the enterprise 100.
It can be seen that in such an enterprise deployment scenario, provider backbone networks 110 using the transport Layer 2 connectivity solution can flood these broadcast data frames to all locations in the enterprise 100. In many instances, enterprise networks do not have identical VLAN setup across multiple data frames to all locations, and can flood these broadcast/multicast frames to all locations which will result in wastage of bandwidth in the provider backbone network 110 as well as superfluous network utilization by the enterprise 100.
Other features of the present embodiments will be apparent from the accompanying drawings and from the detailed description that follows.